Part 3

A party formed in the fashion thus projected would be simply a house of cards, carefully built, as such houses usually are, by those who have nothing better to do--pretty to look at, but turned over by the first breeze. Lobby combinations such as this are hothouse plants; brought into the open they die. In Carlyle's "French Revolution," much ridicule is poured upon the wondrous paper constitutions of the Abbe Sieyes, which somehow would not "march." Within the last few years the Duc de Broglie was famous throughout Europe for the clockwork arrangements he made for France, and the constant failure that awaited them. The "national party" recalls the works of both duke and abbe, and, like them, would resemble nothing so much as a flying machine, constructed upon the most approved principles by really skilled workmen, and scientifically certain to succeed, but having, when tested, only one defect--it will not fly.

VI.--IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?

It is perfectly natural to be asked, after trying to prove that partisanship is praiseworthy, and that a "national" party is out of the question, whether one party is so much better than the other that it deserves strenuous and continued support. For the purposes of the argument, it is necessary to consider only the two great parties in the State--the Liberal and the Tory. These represent the main tendencies which actuate mankind in public affairs--the go-ahead and the stand-still. Differences in the expression of these tendencies there are bound to be, according as circumstances vary; but, generally speaking, the Tory is the party of those who, being satisfied with things as they are, are content to stand still, while the Liberal is the party of those who, thinking there is ample room for improvement, desire to go ahead.

The recent history of our country is all in favour of the Liberal contention. If two men ride on a horse one must ride behind, and if two parties take opposite views of the same measure one must be wrong. The best testimony to the fact that, as a whole, the Liberal policy pursued by this country for more than half a century has been right, is, therefore, that even when the Tories have been in the majority they have not attempted to reverse it. Every great question that has been agitated for by the Liberals as a body, except Home Rule, which has yet to be settled, has been settled in the way they wished; and has more than once been carried to the last point of success by the Tories themselves. Not even the staunchest Conservative would urge a return to the system of rotten boroughs, would repeal the Education Act, re-establish the Irish Church, or renew open voting; and the Tories who would re-enact the Corn Laws continue few.

Lord Salisbury has contended that, even if the Liberals have always been right and the Tories wrong, it should make no difference to the present-day voter; and, speaking at Reading in the autumn of 1883, he asked--"Would any of you go to an apothecary's shop because the previous tenant was a very good man at curing rheumatism? You would say, 'It matters little to me whether the former tenant was a skilful man or not; all that concerns me is the skill of the present tenant of the establishment.'" But supposing, to carry on Lord Salisbury's illustration, this new tenant could say, "I have in my possession a recipe of my predecessor which proved itself an infallible cure for rheumatism; I prepare it in the same fashion; it will have the same result." Would one not reply, "I will rather trust the recipe which has always done good, even though in the course of nature it has changed owners, than put myself in the hands of the opposition chemist, who, though exceedingly old and eminently respectable, never effects a cure, but whenever he is called in leaves the patient worse than he finds him?"

And when Lord Salisbury strove to make his point more clear, he did not mend matters much. "It is only the existing party, whether Liberal or Conservative," he said, "that really concerns you; success, wisdom, and justice do not stick to organizations or buildings--they are the attributes of men. It is by their present acts and their present principles that the two parties must be judged." Even if this be allowed--and, carried to its logical extent, it would justify every piece of "political legerdemain" (the phrase applied by Lord Salisbury himself to Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill) the Tory party has ever perpetrated, or may ever attempt--Liberals need not shrink from the test. For the Tories, as they have ever done, are now shrinkingly and fearsomely following in the paths the Liberals years ago laid down, with just sufficient deviation to prove that the old Adam of reaction is not dead. Whether it be free trade, or parliamentary reform, or the closure, they initiate nothing; but when the Liberals have cleared the way, they are eager to adopt all that they have previously denounced, and to claim as their own principles they have throughout professed to abhor. Seeing that the Liberals borrow nothing from the Tories, while the Tories borrow a very great deal from the Liberals, we can judge the two parties, as Lord Salisbury wished, by their present acts and their present principles, and show that the Liberal is the more worthy of popular support.

It is, of course, not to be wondered at that such a desire to ignore the past should be expressed by a politician who, from his maiden speech to his most recent efforts, has denounced Liberal ideas; who, at various stages of his parliamentary career, has opposed the spread of popular education, the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the ballot, the emancipation of the Jews, the extinction of Church rates, the full admission of Dissenters to the Universities, the abolition of purchase in the army, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, the throwing open of the Civil Service to the people, the right of Nonconformists to be buried in their parish churchyard, the remission of long-standing and obviously unpayable Irish arrears, and the destruction of the property qualification for members of Parliament; whose sympathy for his fellows may be gathered from his insinuated comparison of the Irish to Hottentots, and his declaration that it is "just" that the children of those who have contracted marriage with their deceased wife's sister should be bastardized; whose taste for diplomacy was shown by his direction to a Viceroy to "create" a pretext for forcing a quarrel upon Afghanistan; whose regard for the strictness of truth was displayed in his denial of the authenticity of a well-remembered secret memorandum; whose love for liberty was evidenced by the lukewarmness with which he watched the struggles for freedom in Italy and Bulgaria, and the hearty and continuous support he gave to the slave-holding faction in America; and whose affection for the people may be judged from the fact that, throughout his political life, his name has never been identified with a single piece of constructive legislation for their welfare. "By their fruits shall ye know them" is applicable to politics, therefore; as Lord Salisbury, by so strenuously endeavouring to ignore the maxim, practically admits; and at the risk of putting aside the canon of criticism adopted by the noble marquis, let me show some of the fruits of modern Liberal policy.

I rise in the morning and go to my breakfast; my tea, my coffee, my sugar, and my ham are all of easy price because of the reductions in import duties made by Liberal Governments. I take up my newspaper, and I have it so cheaply because Mr. Gladstone, despite the utmost efforts of the Conservatives, secured the repeal of the paper duty. I go to business, and, as I write my letter or my postcard, I cannot but reflect that a Liberal Ministry in 1840 allowed me to send the one for a penny, and a Liberal Ministry in 1870 to send the other for half that sum. I proceed to dinner, and find that bread, cheese, and much of my dessert are the more available because of Liberal remissions. And as in the evening I visit the theatre, the very opera glasses I hold in my hand are the cheaper because, in one of his Budgets, Mr. Gladstone included these among the hundreds of other articles from which he removed a small but galling tax.

These are some, and only some, of the material benefits resulting from the Liberal policy. What of the political, what of the social, what of the moral benefits? If I am an Englishman, I am proud of the fact that no longer is the national flag allowed to float over a slave; if I am a Scotchman, I rejoice that my country has been freed from the extraordinary system of mis-representation which weighed upon it like a nightmare before 1832; if I am an Irishman, I am not forced at the point of the bayonet to pay tithes to an alien Church, to liquidate arrears for rack-rents owing from the time of the famine, or to give an exorbitant rent for the result of my own improvements; if I am a Churchman, my Church has been strengthened by the repeal of enactments which provoked opposition, while providing no good for the Establishment they professed to serve; if I am a Nonconformist, I am no longer liable to have my goods seized in support of a Church in which I do not believe, I have the right to be married in my own place of worship, and to be buried by my own minister by the side of my fathers; if I am a Catholic, I have been liberated from certain restrictions upon my religion, which I resented as an insult and a wrong; if I am a Jew, I can sit with the peers, in the Commons, or on the judicial bench; if I belong to the army, and am an officer, my rise is made easy--if I am a private, my rise is made possible, by the abolition of purchase; if I am either soldier or sailor, I owe it mainly to Liberal exertions that discipline is no longer maintained by the lash; if I am a merchant seaman, my life is the better protected because of the efforts of a Liberal member of Parliament; if I am in the Civil Service, I have the greater chance of success because of the destruction of that system of nomination, which, however advantageous to the aristocracy, was fatal to modest merit; if I am a student, I can go to a University with the certainty that not now shall I be deprived of the reward of my exertions because my conscience prevents me from subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles; if I am a tradesman, my goods are freed from many a customs duty which formerly restricted their sale; if I am a farmer, I can vote without fear of my landlord, my lands have been to some extent saved from the depredations of hares and rabbits, and my tenure has been rendered more certain than ever before; if I am an artisan, the fruits of combination have been secured to me, my employer has been made liable for accidents arising from either his carelessness or his greed, my vote has been obtained, and by the ballot has been protected; if I am the child of the poorest, a school has been opened for me where a sound education can be procured at a small cost; in fact, in whatever station I may chance to be placed, I cannot but feel in my every-day life the beneficent influences of the policy advocated by leaders of advanced thought, and adopted by Liberal Ministries during the past fifty years.

If, then, I am asked to justify the Liberal party by showing what it has done, I answer that, by timely reform, it has saved England from the continental curse of frequent revolution; that, in striving for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it has in especial elevated and educated the masses, for whom it has provided cheap food for both body and mind; and that it has struggled, and in the main successfully struggled, to secure civil and religious equality for all. And in the future as in the past, with perfect liberty as its fixed ideal, and with peace, retrenchment, and reform as the methods by which it wishes that ideal to be obtained, it will press onward and upward, and ever onward and upward, until England, now regarded as the mother of free nations, shall be but one of a gigantic brotherhood of freedom, embracing every civilized people that may then inhabit the globe.

VII.--WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?

After this recital of Liberal deeds, it may fairly be asked, "What are Liberal principles?" and these it is not easy to define off-hand. There are certain general truths which are the commonplaces of both parties, and no serious attempt has yet been made to lay down a system of principles with which none except Liberals can agree. But there are differences that underlie the action of the two parties which are unmistakable, and are worth finding out.

If one were to ask the first half-dozen Liberals he met for a definition of their principles, varying and perhaps vague replies would be received. For in politics, as in other matters that combine speculation with practical action, it is only the few who speculate, while the many are content to act. And even most of those who tried to answer would be apt to reply that Liberal principles could be summed up in the old party watch-word--"Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform," thus confounding Liberal principles with Liberal aims.

That these aims are well worth striving for has long been an accepted doctrine of the party; but, in trying to gain them, we have to adapt them to circumstances, and are not called upon in every single emergency to push them to their logical extent. Logic, after all, is only a pair of spectacles, not eyesight itself; and attempts to arrange human affairs upon too precise a basis frequently end, as France so often has shown, in failure. We long for peace, but not for peace at any price; we ask for retrenchment, but not an indiscriminate paring down of expenditure for the sake of showing a saving; and we struggle for reform, but not to cut all the branches off the trees on the chance of improving their appearance.

Before, in fact, we have been able to struggle at all for these or any other points in politics, certain principles have had to be acted upon by generations of progressive thinkers, which have developed and strengthened our liberties. It is, perhaps, presumptuous to attempt to lay down in a few words a basis of Liberal principle, but I would submit that that basis may be found in the contention that

_All men should be equal before the law_;

that, as a consequence,

_All should have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action_;

and that, in order to secure and retain these liberties,

_The people should govern themselves_.

With regard to the first point, I do not contend that all men are, or ever can be, equal. Differences of mental and physical strength, of energy and temperament, and of will to work, there must always be; and in the struggle for existence, which is likely to grow even keener as the world becomes more filled, the fittest must continue to come to the top, as they have done and deserve to do. A law-made equality would not last a week, but much law-made inequality has lasted for centuries, and it is against this that Liberals as Liberals must protest. We object to all law-made privilege, and we ask that men gifted with equal capacities shall have equal chances. We do not claim any new privilege for the poor, but we demand the abolition of the old privileges, express and un-express, of the rich. Something was done in the latter direction when the system of nomination in most departments of the civil service and that of purchase in the army were got rid of. But as long as in the higher departments of public affairs a man has a place in the legislature merely because he is the son of his father; as long as in the humbler branches no one unpossessed of a property qualification can sit on certain local boards; and as long as in daily life the facilities for frequent appeal, devised by lawyers within the House for the benefit of lawyers without, provide a power for wealth that is often used to defeat the ends of justice, so long, to take these alone out of many instances, shall we lack that equality of opportunity which we demand not as a favour but a right.

But if every man is to be equal before the law, he must have the right to think as his reason directs; to discuss as freely as he thinks; and to act as he pleases, so long as his neighbour is not injured in the honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal put in jeopardy. "Give me," said Milton, "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue according to conscience, above all liberties"--for it is certain that with freedom of thought and discussion all other liberties will follow. John Mill carried this principle to the fullest extent when he argued that "if all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." To all such sweeping generalizations there are, however, possible exceptions. No man would be much inclined to blame Cromwell for suppressing the pamphlet "Killing no Murder," which directly advocated his own assassination; even the strongest lover of free discussion would not be prepared to allow the systematic circulation of exhortations to blow up our public buildings, and directions as to the best way of doing it; and instances may conceivably arise--and an invasion one of them--where absolute freedom of publication and debate would form a national danger. Our liberties, therefore, would be sufficiently protected if we recognized the right of every man to speak and to act as he pleases, "so long as his neighbour is not injured in the honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal put in jeopardy."

In order, however, that men may be able to think, speak, and do as they deem right, it is necessary that the people shall rule, and that the majority, when it has made up its mind, shall have the power to carry out its decree. Even the Tories of these days will not dispute this principle, and, therefore, Liberals cannot claim it as at this moment their own; and yet, broadly speaking, the root idea of the Tory party is the aristocratic theory that the few ought to govern the many, while that of the Liberal party is the democratic, that the many ought to govern the few.

In the days before the mass of the people were a real power in the affairs of the State, this difference was very clearly marked, for the Tories then were under no necessity to conceal their belief that the "common herd" were not to be trusted in political concerns. And it is useful, as showing what the high Tory doctrine on this point really was, to recall the fact that a judge on the bench, less than a century ago, in summing up at a political trial, laid it down as a doctrine not to be questioned that "a government in every country should be just like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkle of an eye; but landed property cannot be removed." And another judge at a political trial within the present century went even further in denying to the people not merely the right of interference with public affairs, but even of comment upon them. "It is said," he observed, "that we have a right to discuss the acts of our legislature. This would be a large permission indeed. Is there to be a power in the people to counteract the acts of the Parliament; and is the libeller to come and make the people dissatisfied with the Government under which he lives? This is not to be permitted to any man,--it is unconstitutional and seditious." We have outgrown such doctrines as these; and, thanks to the efforts of generations of Liberals who have passed to their rest, the right of the "rabble who have nothing but personal property"--or, for the matter of that, no property at all--to take part in settling the affairs of the State, whether by criticism or active interference, is solidly established.

It may be argued that as the Tories of to-day have accepted democracy, the Liberals have no right to claim the principles here laid down as if they were without exception their own. But this Tory acceptance of democratic ideas is only partial, and a party which mainly depends upon the aristocracy for support can never adopt them with consistency and enthusiasm. The very existence of an hereditary legislature violates the principle that all men should be equal before the law; the theory upon which a State-established Church rests is equally a violation of the right of every one to think, speak, and act as he chooses; and the continuous efforts of the Tories to limit the franchise, and to erect barriers against the majority having their will, are utterly opposed to the view that the people should govern, and harmonize with the old idea that the people should be governed.

It must not be imagined that these differences between the parties mean nothing, or that we are beyond all danger of losing the advance we have made. The ease with which we might slip back into despotism is shown by the manner in which the Tories resort to coercion--or, as they prefer to term it, "exceptional legislation"--when a majority of the Irish people has to be cowed. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the abolition of trial by jury, the extinction of liberty of the press, and the denial of the right of public meeting have been frequently enacted against the majority of the people of Ireland, because their views on the political situation have not accorded with those of the majority of the people of England. And though they have all failed, and repeatedly failed, a variation of the same old plan is put in operation to-day as if it were a newly-discovered and infallible remedy for every popular ill.

Easy-going folk are apt to reply that, as these things concern only Ireland, it is of no special moment to ourselves, and that England is safe from any revival of a despotic system. Even if this were true it would be false morality, and false morality makes bad politics. But it is not true. Despotism is a disease which spreads, and any development of it applied to one part of the body politic might, in conceivable circumstances, be used as a precedent to apply it to the whole. And if it be said that in these happy days the men of England have the undisputed right to think as they like and talk as they will, it can be answered that not one of the shackles upon freedom of thought and freedom of action has been voluntarily struck off by the Tories, and that it is only lately that they prevented a member of Parliament for years from taking the seat to which he had been four times elected, because he avowed what he believed upon theological questions.

The difference between the two parties, even in the present general acceptance of a democratic system, may be put in words once used by Mr. Chamberlain--"It is the essential condition, the cardinal principle of Liberalism, that we should recognize rights, and not merely confer favours." With us, the suffrage is the right of every free citizen; with the Tories, it is a favour conferred upon the working by the moneyed classes. We demand religious equality; the Tories are willing to give toleration. But favours we do not ask, and toleration we will not have.